Observations on current events

NY Times: Hopes of Building Nation's First New Nuclear Plant in Decades

Editor and Publisher: Reporter Apologizes for Iraq Coverage
"The media are finished with their big blowouts on the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and there's one thing they forgot to say: We're sorry.
Sorry we let unsubstantiated claims drive our coverage.
Sorry we were dismissive of experts who disputed White House charges against Iraq.
Sorry we let a band of self-serving Iraqi defectors make fools of us.
Sorry we fell for Colin Powell's performance at the United Nations.
Sorry we couldn't bring ourselves to hold the administration's feet to the fire before the war, when it really mattered.
Maybe we'll do a better job next war.
Of course it's absurd to receive this apology from a person so low in the media hierarchy. You really ought to be getting it from the editors and reporters at the agenda-setting publications, such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. It's the elite print media that failed you the most, because they're the institutions you have to rely on to keep tabs on the politicians in Washington"

Paul Krugman: This Isn't America

William Rivers Pitt: The Line

NY Times Editorial: Hearts, Minds and Padlocks
"Shutting down a Baghdad newspaper, even one disseminating untruths, hardly makes the case for American-style freedoms to Iraqis."

Democracy Now! - Navy Public Affairs Officer in Iraq Condemns Bush & U.S. Invasion

Star Tribune: Another Accuser Confirms Clarke's Charges

Surprise! The Bush campaign is using fear again. They've posted a Kerry's Gas Tax Calculator and claim: "John Kerry has supported a 50 cent increase in the gas tax. Use our calculator to find out how much Kerry's gas tax would cost you at the pump on a specific trip or each year."

The problem is that it uses false data. My compact gets 44/49 city/highway mpg, according to the EPA. Their site uses an average mpg of 32 to perform the calculation. What possible reason could they have to want to mislead people? The obvious reason is, again, that fear works. They do not want people to pay attention to the role that Bush's Iraq War played in destabilizing the region and the resulting rise in the price of oil. They want people to be very afraid of anyone who wants to reduce America's demand for oil. The logic that dramatically higher gas prices are the only means to convince people to drive efficient vehicles is lost on Bush & Co. In fact, this administration, like Clinton's before it, as well as the Congressional majority are totally uninterested in lowering the amount of petroleum the US uses. It's as if they're saying 'Go ahead, drive a V8! It's good for you and it's good for America. Anyone who tells you different doesn't love freedom.' Perhaps petrodollar-financed terrorism isn't as much of a problem as I thought. Bush & Co.'s fear is that people might make the connection between how much oil we use and why our Middle East foreign policy has a military component that costs hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Robert Fisk: Britain's secret army in Iraq: thousands of armed security men who answer to nobody

Iraqi Defector's Tales Bolstered U.S. Case for War
"U.S. officials never had direct access to the defector and didn't even know his real name until after the war. Instead, his story was provided by German agents, and his file was so thick with details that American officials thought it confirmed long-standing suspicions that the Iraqis had developed mobile germ factories to evade arms inspections. Curveball's story has since crumbled under doubts raised by the Germans and the scrutiny of U.S. weapons hunters, who have come to see his code name as particularly apt, given the problems that beset much of the prewar intelligence collection and analysis."

AP: Cross Bush, Face Payback

AP:Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D - W.Va.) regrets his vote to authorize a war against Iraq

Harley Sorensen: Heads-Up To Ashcroft Proves Threat Was Known Before 9/11

Detroit Free Press: Bush's Medicare dream turning into a nightmare

The Guardian (UK) - Bush is a fear president

Salon.com - FBI Translator: 'We Knew 9/11 Attacks Were Coming'

UPI: Probe may force DeLay to step down

NY Times: Voting Rights of Florida Felons Scrutinized After 2000 Election

NY Times: The Commissioners: Panel Members, Insiders All, Question Friends, but Too Gingerly for Some Viewers

BBC: Bush's Iraq WMDs joke backfires

It's one thing to be wrong about something, but it's entirely another to make jokes about the reason given to the country about going to war. A level of callousness and the height of hubris is evident in someone who laughs at the stated reason for war. He is not only laughing at the public for having believed his causus belli, but also at the 500+ who have given their lives at the order of their Commander in Chief.

The Independent (UK) - September 11: evidence of secret deals, missed chances and fatal misjudgements

The Desert Sun: GOP split by environment strategy

AP: FBI's Mueller Warns of Terrorist Plots

NY Times: The Occupation: U.S. Officials Fashion Legal Basis to Keep Force in Iraq
What we had heard until now was that if the Iraqi government wanted the US out, it would leave. It seems not.

NY Times: Chalabi, Nimble Exile, Searches for Role in Iraq

BBC: Oil giant Shell signs Libya deal Here we see why it was critical to get Libya on the 'right' side of the 'War on Tarrah'. There is much money to be made from extracting oil, and the West doesn't (openly) do business with 'terrorists.'

NY Times: Medicare Official Testifies on Cost Figures
"Mr. Foster said he had shared his cost estimates with Doug Badger, the president's special assistant for health policy, and with James C. Capretta, associate director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. But he said that Thomas A. Scully, who was then administrator of the Medicare program, directed him to withhold the information from Congress, citing orders from the White House in one instance."

NY Times: Missed Chances in a Long Hunt for bin Laden

San Francisco Chronicle: Cheney, energy and Iraq invasion / Supreme Court to rule on secrecy

NY Times Editorial: Pinch at the Pump

Paul Krugman: Lifting the Shroud

The Progressive: The Ballots are Still Full of Holes

Helen Thomas: Justifying invasion a full-time job

Naomi Klein: Iraq under the U.S. thumb: The White House wants to make the Iraqis seem to be out of control, incapable of governing without U.S. direction

Pat. Buchanan's stinging indictment of the Neoconservative foreign policy agenda as spelled out in a new book by Richard Perle: No End to War

Robert Dreyfuss: The Thirty-Year Itch
"Three decades ago, in the throes of the energy crisis, Washington's hawks conceived of a strategy for US control of the Persian Gulf's oil. Now, with the same strategists firmly in control of the White House, the Bush administration is playing out their script for global dominance. "

The above article clears up any misconceptions that US policy in the Middle East has anything do with democracy at its core, but rather only with control over the oil supply. A recent article by Ricardo Bayon in the Atlantic Monthly spells out quite clearly that US GDP growth is nearly impossible when the price of oil rises, and that three economic recessions have been preceded by oil price spikes in 1973, 1979 and 1990.

Yet the political will to seek alternative sources of energy is fully absent in the White House and Congress. Such an approach seems to validate the current approach of management of Middle Eastern & Central Asian foreign policy via military intervention. Is the topic of energy independence at its core really so unspeakable in Washington as to make a military solution to our energy needs the only one that can be agreed upon? One need only look at the appetite of the US economy for oil and petroleum-based goods to see the cause of the dismay at seeking alternatives. The US would be forced to change a great deal, if an alternative to oil were required. Change would hurt especially those who have vested interests in petroleum production, oil field services, petrochemical production of every description (fertilizers, pesticides, plastics, lubricants, cosmetics), the auto industry and its suppliers, road construction, and developers who push mass-transit-less suburban sprawl.

Not surprisingly, approaches that would seek to merely reduce the amount of oil we use are shot down by Congress. The US auto industry even blackmailed its own workers' unions into using its sway on Capitol Hill to oppose mandated fuel efficiency hikes. Those who argue for a continuation of the status quo are making at least one flawed assumption: that the long-term US domination of the Middle East's petroleum reserves can be achieved by force. Such thinking is as financially irresponsible as it is dishonest.

The dishonesty shows itself in the way in which the military costs of securing access to oil are hidden in the $400+ billion Defense budget, rather than being added to the price of the commodity being protected. Such realistic accounting of what oil costs would indubitably give most US consumers the shock of their lives when they pulled up to the gas pump. Do the pushers of the status quo think that this problem will just go away, or that the US public will continue to think that imported fuel is 'cheap' at $2.00/gal.? They've been right so far: a little war is so much cheaper than an honest look at how much oil we buy from parts of the world that have been made all the more volatile thanks to US involvement in resource extraction.

Washington Post: Foster: White House Had Role In Withholding Medicare Data
"Richard S. Foster, the government's chief analyst of Medicare costs who was threatened with firing last year if he disclosed too much information to Congress, said last night that he believes the White House participated in the decision to withhold analyses that Medicare legislation President Bush sought would be far more expensive than lawmakers knew."

Robert Fisk: New Iraq? Hooded Protest and Masked Statistics

The Independent (UK) - One year on, and still the hard core march the world over

Newsday: Bush campaign gear made in Burma
"His campaign store sells a pullover from nation whose products he has banned from being sold in the U.S."

The Independent (UK) - Carter savages Blair and Bush: 'Their war was based on lies'
It's really quite rare for ex-Presidents to criticize sitting ones. Carter deferred to Bush's judgement before the war. Obviously, his opinion of the Administration has changed markedly.

Adam Cohen: Justice Rehnquist Writes on Hayes vs. Tilden, With His Mind on Bush v. Gore

The Independent (UK) - Pakistan declares ceasefire with al-Qa'ida fighters as criticism of offensive mounts

Reuters: Ex-Advisor Says Bush Eyed Bombing of Iraq on 9/11

AP on the NY Times in the NY Times: Fears Impacted U.S. Reporting on Iraq

The Guardian (UK) - Things get worse with Coke

"First, Coca-Cola's new brand of 'pure' bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its 'highly sophisticated purification process', based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units. Yesterday, just when executives in charge of a £7m marketing push for the product must have felt it could get no worse, it did precisely that. The entire UK supply of Dasani was pulled off the shelves because it has been contaminated with bromate, a cancer-causing chemical. "

The Guardian (UK) - General garner sacked by Bush because he wanted early elections
"Jay Garner, the US general abruptly dismissed as Iraq's first occupation administrator after a month in the job, says he fell out with the Bush circle because he wanted free elections and rejected an imposed programme of privatisation."

A rare moment of light from the corporate media: Rumsfeld has to eat his words on CBS's 'Face The Nation' MoveOn.org Video

Paul Krugman: Taken for a Ride
"...in the Bush vision, it was never legitimate to challenge any piece of the administration's policy on Iraq. Before the war, it was your patriotic duty to trust the president's assertions about the case for war. Once we went in and those assertions proved utterly false, it became your patriotic duty to support the troops — a phrase that, to the administration, always means supporting the president. At no point has it been legitimate to hold Mr. Bush accountable. And that's the way he wants it."

NY Times: Scalia Refusing to Take Himself Off Cheney Case

NY Times: McCain Says Kerry Not Weak on Defense

The Telegraph (UK):Chalabi stands by faulty intelligence that toppled Saddam's regime
"Mr Chalabi, by far the most effective anti-Saddam lobbyist in Washington, shrugged off charges that he had deliberately misled US intelligence. 'We are heroes in error,' he told the Telegraph in Baghdad. 'As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants.' "

So, Mr. Chalabi is saying: 'so what if, while on the US payroll, I fabricated lies that were used as intelligence for the basis of an invasion of an oil-rich sovereign state. We got what we wanted all along and so did the people who paid me.'

ENN: Bush administration packs the courts with anti-environmental judges

Molly Ivins: Red alert at the White House

Asia Times: 'Liberating' Saudi's Shi'ites (and their oil)

US House Rep. Henry Waxman is to be applauded for making this information available and calling attention to it. I hope he won't be alone amongst his hundreds of colleagues in making it an issue of public debate. The tragedy in all of this is the failure of the mainstream media to have pursued this story when it could have made a significant difference: before the invasion of Iraq. Why do they seem to ignore that serious journalism requires asking tough questions of people in positions of authority?
Iraq on the Record:
"237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq made by...five officials in 125 public appearances in the time leading up to and after the commencement of hostilities in Iraq."

Paul Krugman: Weak on Terror

Wired News: Darpa's Far-Out Dreams on Display including huge surveillance blimps.

Democracy Now! - U.S.-Financed INC Fed Misinformation to Press
"The Knight Ridder news agency is reporting that the Iraqi National Congress routinely fed exaggerated or fabricated intelligence on Iraq to dozens of media outlets in the U.S. and around the world before the Iraq invasion. In June of 2002 the INC sent the Senate Appropriations Committee a list of just over 100 news articles about Iraq that were based on information provided by the INC's Information Collection Program, which was funded by the U.S. government. The articles asserted Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Osama Bin Laden. Most of the information came from the same half-dozen defectors whose information was questioned by the CIA and State Department. Publications and agencies that ran the articles based on the U.S.-funded misinformation included many of the major US newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal as well as Time, CNN, the BBC and the Associated Press."

Stop FCC - Free Speech Campaign Petition First Amendment Rights: "A message from the creator of StopFCC.Com -
I started StopFCC.com because I'm tired of politicians standing up and talking about 'Protecting our Freedom' one day, and then the next day they are pushing the FCC to fine a broadcaster millions of dollars over words that offend a few campaign contributors. A few large media companies and politicians get to decide what I can watch, read and listen to? I guess in this election year 'Freedom' only means 'Fighting Terrorism' and does not include the First Amendment." You can sign the petition here.

LA Times: Mercury Emissions Rule Geared to Benefit Industry
"Political appointees in the Environmental Protection Agency bypassed agency professional staff and a federal advisory panel last year to craft a rule on mercury emissions preferred by the industry and the White House, several longtime EPA officials say. The EPA staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order. At the same time, the proposal to regulate mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants was written using key language provided by utility lobbyists."

The San Francisco Chronicle: The truth leaks out

NY Times: U.S. Videos, for TV News, Come Under Scrutiny
"Federal investigators are scrutinizing television segments in which the Bush administration paid people to pose as journalists praising the benefits of the new Medicare law, which would be offered to help elderly Americans with the costs of their prescription medicines."

NY Times Editorial on the necessity of Justice Scalia's recusal from the case surrounding the Cheney energy task force: Beyond the Duck Blind

Baltimore Sun: UM study critical of WMD media coverage
"[the study] argues that the media swallowed whole the claims of government officials about the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and elsewhere." This raises the question: is the media most Americans consume a watchdog or a lapdog?

San Francisco Chronicle: 'Special skills draft' on drawing board / Computer experts, foreign language specialists lead list of military's needs

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Medicare analyst confirms muzzling
"He said his boss told him he'd be fired if he gave lawmakers higher cost estimates for the prescription-drug bill."

The Independent (UK) - US revealed to be secretly funding opponents of Chavez

Newsday: At $6 an hour, who needs a tax cut? or 'Bush Campaign Photo-Op Crowd Didn't Speak English'

Washington Post: EPA Data On Water Purity Faulted
"The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has overstated the purity of the nation's drinking water in four recent years, potentially leaving millions of people at risk, according to a new report."

Democracy Now! - Aristide's Return to the Caribbean

Reuters: Kerry Challenges Bush to Monthly Debates Debates would be a much more productive means of generating national discussion than both sides throwing millions at media ads for the next 8 months.

Reuters: U.S. Senate Panel Accord on Memo Probe Collapses "Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican, announced on Thursday evening he was not going to take any further action on the memo probe and would leave it up to the Senate sergeant-at-arms to decide what to do next."

AP: "The removal of souvenir debris from the scenes of the Sept. 11 attacks reached the highest levels of government, including Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and FBI Director Robert Mueller's chief of anti-terrorism, a Justice Department investigation has found".

Paul Krugman: No More Excuses on Jobs

The Guardian (UK) - GuardianScales of justice

The Guardian (UK) - Swiss told to seize Yukos cash

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR): GOP Rhetoric on Kerry's Voting Record Goes Unchallenged
"...at the time of the 1991 vote, deeper cuts in military spending were being advocated by some prominent Republicans-- including then-President George H.W Bush and Dick Cheney, who was secretary of defense at the time...Cheney appealed for more cuts from Congress: 'You've squabbled and sometimes bickered and horse-traded and ended up forcing me to spend money on weapons that don't fill a vital need in these times of tight budgets and new requirements.' Cheney went to name the M-1 tank and the F-14 and F-16 fighters-- all of which appear on the RNC's list-- as 'great systems' that 'we have enough of.' "

LA Times: Spy Unit Skirted CIA on Iraq

Salon.com - The new Pentagon papers
"A high-ranking military officer reveals how Defense Department extremists suppressed information and twisted the truth to drive the country to war."

Windows Applications Vulnerabilities:

If you use PDF documents, read this: Adobe Acrobat Reader 5.1 (and earlier) Lets Attackers In
"An attacker can exploit [a] buffer overflow on one of your user's computers by enticing your user to a Web site hosting a specially malformed file, or by sending it in an e-mail. Although NGSSoftware doesn't detail the scope of this flaw, most stack-based buffer overflows allow attackers to execute code with the privileges of the currently logged in user. If any of your users have local administrator privileges, an attacker might exploit this flaw to gain control of your user's machine. If you use Adobe Acrobat Reader in your network you should download, test, and deploy Adobe Reader 6 as soon as possible."

If you use WinZip, read this: WinZip Buffer Overflow Allows Hacker Take-Over
"By sending [a] WinZip users a specially crafted file, a hacker can exploit this buffer overflow to run code on [a] user's computer, and possibly gain full control of it. If your users have installed any version of WinZip, either remove it or upgrade to the latest version (9.0)."

Robert Sheer: The lies that bind White House team to Iraq

NY Times: C.I.A. Chief Says He's Corrected Cheney Privately

Salon.com - Bush in Trouble in Florida

The American Prospect: Plugging Leaks by Murray S. Waas
"President Bush's chief political adviser, Karl Rove, told the FBI in an interview last October that he circulated and discussed damaging information regarding CIA operative Valerie Plame with others in the White House, outside political consultants, and journalists, according to a government official and an attorney familiar with the ongoing special counsel's investigation of the matter."

The Guardian (UK): Mystery of seized jet deepens

Center for Public Integrity: Bush's Insider Trading

The Register (UK): "Gram for gram, computers create more pollution than cars"

Greg Palast: The Forgotten Soldiers of Operation 'Iraqi Freedom'

Two articles of note by Naomi Klein in The Nation:

Hold Bush to His Lie

Outsourcing the Friedman

BBC: Zimbabwe 'seizes US cargo plane'

Newsday: Subpoenas Seek to Show Attempts to Discredit Joseph Wilson

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy: "The Buck Doesn't Stop Here Anymore."

LA Times:Scalia Addressed Advocacy Group Before Key Decision

Denver Post: Colorado bookstores join Patriot Act protest

Washington Post: Ashcroft Campaign Funds Under Scrutiny

CNN: RNC tells TV stations not to run anti-Bush ads

William Rivers Pitt:Selling Death for Fun and Profit

I do not recall the Times covering this story when it first broke in the Guardian (UK) a year ago, but here is their contribution: How Tiny Swiss Cellphone Chips Helped Track Global Terror Web

ENN: A radioactive nightmare in Concord, Massachusetts

CS Monitor: Kay calls on Bush to 'come clean' about WMD

The Guardian (UK): Blair lacked critical thinking, says Blix

Paul Krugman: Social Security Scares

UPI: GI Denied Health Care After Speaking Out

Washington Post: Violence, Turnover Blunt CIA Effort in Iraq "The CIA has rushed to Iraq four times as many clandestine officers as it had planned on, but it has had little success penetrating the resistance and identifying foreign terrorists involved in the insurgency"

Planet Ark: Senate's Daschle Says Has Votes to Pass Energy Bill 'It's the same old package of pork - it's rancid pork,' - Sen. John McCain (R) AZ.

Molly Ivins: Four wars and a cloud of dust

Maureen Dowd: See Dick Run

NY Times Editorial: Tom DeLay and the Lobbying Game

US secrecy hurts the so-called War on Terror: German Court Overturns Conviction in 9/11 Case "Germany's highest court today overturned the verdict against the only person convicted of involvement in the Sept. 11 terror attacks, after his lawyer argued that he had not gotten a fair trial because the United States refused to allow key testimony."

Seymour Hersh: Why is Washington going easy on Pakistan’s nuclear black marketers?

NBC News: Avoiding attacking suspected terrorist mastermind

After reading this story from NBC News, I thought, why are we paying for new weapons, if not to generate business revenue for someone in favor ? The post-war disarmament of Iraq's army should have been quite the source of AK-47 rifles, hundreds of thousands of them. Where are the Iraqi army's small arms ?

If you have not yet had the opportunity to see the film 'The Truth Uncovered,' the transcript is well worth a read. Sen. Edward Kennedy, commenting on the film said: " 'Uncovered: the whole truth about the Iraq war' is a devastating analysis of the abuses and distortions of intelligence used by the Bush administration in making its case for the war in Iraq. If the American people and Congress had been told the whole truth, America would have never gone to war."


ITAR-TASS News Agency: US plans to move military bases from Saudi Arabia to Iraq The Bush Administration, it seems, has every expectation that the new 'democratic' government of Iraq will welcome the permanent stationing of US troops in Iraq with open arms. The same arms that were expected to greet the Americans as 'liberators,' I suppose. The people of Iraq might have a different take on the matter, but nobody is asking them. A better example of contempt for democracy could hardly be asked for.

Michael Meurer: Greenspan Testimony Highlights Bush Plan for Deliberate Federal Bankruptcy: "Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan's Feb. 25 testimony to the House Budget Committee provided an unintentionally candid look at the Bush administration's deliberate fiscal policy of bankrupting the federal government to justify a sweeping program of privatization."

NY Times: 9/11 Panel Rejects White House Limits on Interviews I hope this Administration's penchant for secrecy ends up being the source of its ultimate demise. Who's afraid of a little sunshine?

Noam Chomsky: The Tragedy of Haiti (1993)

AlterNet: U.S.-Sponsored Regime Change in Haiti

Publisher's Weekly: Joseph Wilson's Book Will Reveal White House Leak

Steve Weissman: Spies, Lies, and Little Bombshells

William Rivers Pitt: Aristide Kidnapped by U.S. Forces?

Sen. Robert Byrd: A Budget of Gimmicks and False Promises

Paul Krugman on Fed Chairman Greenspan's agenda: Maestro of Chutzpah

Liberation (FR): Mexico is Contaminated by Its Neighbor

CS Monitor: America's new coal rush "Utilities' dramatic push to build new plants would boost energy security but hurt the environment."

The Nation: The Junk Science of George W. Bush

Ron Suskind: The Free-Lunch Bunch - The Bush team's secret plan to "reform" Social Security

AP: White House Denies Forcing Aristide Out